1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to hypervideo filtering and more particularly to providing customers access through a communications network to digital video information stored on a merchant""s server.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Electronic commerce over communications networks is becoming an important technology in today""s market place. Electronic commerce allows goods and services to be sold over a network and also facilitates the sales and distribution of digital information. At the same time, digital video storage and streaming (i.e., delivery over a network) is becoming a commodity.
Video is a powerful media for documentation, information exchange, and, of course, for entertainment. In a similar way, global communications networks such as the Internet constitute powerful channels for distributing information to customers. Mostly, Internet users have been able to consume the information for free. For content owners, this shopping model is not attractive as it gives few opportunities for increased revenues. There are some content owners and content brokers connected to the Internet today, but only a few give direct access to the information objects. The Internet Movie Database (http://us.imdb.com/), E-online""s Movie Finder (http://www.moviefinder.com/), and the Vanderbilt University""s Television News Archive (http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/) are examples of video archives that can be accessed over the Internet. None of these services gives customers a means to access to the video objects directly today. It is an object of the present invention to provide a system for content owners or brokers to become merchants that can sell video information over a network.
It will be important to such video information merchants to be able to combine video information into several products that can be sold at different prices. A television news merchant, for instance, may want to sell four products: Headline News, International News, National News, and Complete News coverage that are all based on the merchant""s repository of video information but provide different views and depth of coverage. The value of each of these products may be different so the merchant may want to be able to price them differently.
It is also important for the merchant to be able to provide this service without prior agreements with each customer individually. The customer""s ability to pay should be verified on a single transaction basis and the payment transaction should be completed immediately. With this approach, the merchant can provide such services globally and have the product immediately available at the market place.
In many cases, the video information merchant may want to provide cross-references or hyperlinks between information units in the archive. Hypervideo facilitates such hyperlinking.
Hypervideo, which is described by N. Sawhney, D. Balcom, and I. Smith in xe2x80x9cAuthoring And Navigating Video In Space And Timexe2x80x9d, IEEE Multimedia 4(4), 30-39, October, 1997 and by W.-h. Ma, Y.-J. Lee, D. H. C. Du and M. P. McCahill in xe2x80x9cVideo-based Hypermedia For Education-on-demandxe2x80x9d, IEEE Multimedia 5(1), January, 1998, is a non-linear type of video. Hypervideo is consisting of story units called Narrative Sequences of Scenesxe2x80x94NSS (adopted from [Sawhney et al. 1997]) and hyperlinks connecting these story units together. The source and destination node for a hyperlink may be called an Anchorable Information Unit (AIU). In a hypervideo, there are many different types of AIUs. A NSS may itself be an AIU. A temporal or a spatio-temporal region of a NSS may be an AIU (in this case often called hotspot). Any non-video objects such as portions of a hypertext object, pictures, or charts may also be AIUs.
A hypervideo may have several parallel tracks where information is streamed synchronously. For instance, a hypervideo presentation may contain three parallel tracks; one for the video itself, one for a textual transcript of what is being said, and one for an image of the current narrator. Also, there might be several alternative data streams that can be fed into one track. There might be many different sub-titles, for instance, to accomplish multi-lingual sub-titling.
The process of offering different views of hypervideo information can be seen as a filtering process. Thus, the research work done in the area of customized video services by G. Ahanger and T. D. C. Little in xe2x80x9cA System For Customized News Delivery From Video Archivesxe2x80x9d, Proceedings Of The 4th International Conference On Multimedia Computing And Systems, Ottawa, Canada, June 1997 and as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,434,678 entitled xe2x80x9cSeamless Transmission Of Non-sequential Video Segmentsxe2x80x9d issued to M. Abecassis on Jul. 18, 1995, is relevant for providing video information services over a network. This prior art, however, does not address the issues of hypervideo filtering, for instance filtering of AIUs and hyperlinks. Also, the focus for this prior art is to find the most appropriate way to index the semantic contents of video information and to rank information objects based on how relevant these are according to an end-user interest profile. A video information merchant may not need to, or want to know the end-user interest. Thus, it is an object of the present invention to provide filtering that is based on the end-user""s payment choice and capability. This commercial aspect of information filtering has not been addressed by the prior art.
Most of the work in the area of electronic commerce is devoted to generating catalogs from a database of product information, to defining appropriate shopping models and to provide secure payment mechanisms. There is, however, one patent related to the distribution of digital content. This patent is U.S. Pat. No. 5,646,992 entitled xe2x80x9cAssembly, Distribution, and Use Of Digital Informationxe2x80x9d, issued to R. J. Subler and T. M. Hastings on Jul. 8, 1997 and assigned to Digital Delivery, Inc. In this system, an encryption scheme using multiple decryption keys is used to give customers access to a subset of items. Each decryption key will permit decryption of all items belonging to a specific subset.
The present invention provides a system for selling digital video information over a communications network such as the Internet. The information is stored on an information server at a merchant""s video information site. Videos are represented as hypervideos consisting of narrative sequences and hyperlinks. Hyperlinks connect anchorable information units within the hypervideo to other anchorable information units within the same hypervideo or to anchorable information units outside of the hypervideo. A video information customer may establish a network connection to the merchant to browse or search a catalog of available video information. When ordering a video, the customer will have several editions of the same video to choose among. Each edition may have a different quality, duration and price than other editions. When the customer selects a given video edition, the customer will also provide the system with electronic payment information, such as credit card information.
The system basically comprises a filtering server and a service administration system. The filtering server comprises a commerce server for initiating electronic payment transactions, a streaming server that delivers purchased videos to the respective customers and a world-wide web information server. The world-wide web information server provides customers with the following; a list of available videos, the possibility to customize specific versions and a method for calculating the price for a specific version. The world-wide web information server also allows the end-user to electronically purchase a specific version and upon positive outcome of an electronic payment transaction, generates the specific version based on multimedia data and descriptive data stored in the system. The world-wide web further returns the reference to the specific version to the customer for viewing. The service administration system comprises a management tool for the merchant to define price classes and payment schemes according to which the information can be priced and a meta-data editing tool for the merchant to prepare the content for the filtering by defining hyperlinks, by categorizing video nodes and hyperlinks according to price classes, and by defining the amount of promotional information to insert and the rules used to control insertion of promotional information.
The system will connect to external systems to have the payment information verified. If the payment transaction is accepted the system will pass the selected video through a sequence of service filters to generate the edition that the customer selected. A reference to the specific edition of the video is then transferred back to the customer to establish a video transfer connection between the customer""s video display unit and the video information merchant""s video server.